Chapter Nine
LUKE
I had evasive conversations over the years with Paul about Barnabas and their tumultuous journey to Cyprus and parts of Asia. It had begun well in Cyprus, where the Way took root as a result of their deft and early planting. The conversion of the Roman governor Paulus altered circumstances on the island, and gatherings multiplied in Paphos and Salamis and spread to villages around the coast, on the plains of Mesorea, even into the high mountain regions of Troodos and Madari.
It was largely among the Greeks, not the Jews, that the Way of Jesus prospered in Cyprus, making it a model for future missions.
But something had gone amiss, and the matter troubled Paul. A young man recruited by the Pillars had taken against the apostle for reasons Paul never understood. “He challenged my friendship, my affection,” said Paul, in what I took as an elusive remark with enough truth in it to deflect further inquiry. Whatever happened, the boy abandoned this mission after Cyprus, returning to Jerusalem, where he did nothing to enhance Paul’s reputation among the Pillars.
“I don’t know what passed between Paul and John Mark,” Barnabas later said to me, “and I would never ask. Paul is, in my view, an awkward fellow, at best.”
There were unfair innuendos in that comment, but I didn’t press him.
Certainly Paul could be irascible, even peevish, which I knew better than most. As a companion on the road, he tested one’s patience, insisting on his own diet, sleeping arrangements, and directions. I knew enough not to contradict him on many things, and the backlash would foul our relations. He could be intrusive, too, asking personal questions in the way that children do. But there was nothing black in his soul. He might well have behaved toward John Mark without complete respect, only to have his actions (whatever they were) misconstrued.
This unhappy turn after Cyprus bothered Paul, but I stayed away from his occasional efforts to talk about it. Why pick at old wounds?
Paul didn’t lose sight of the mission at hand, and realized after the boy’s departure that two could travel more easily than three. They could change directions quickly, hide, or flee. Lodging became less complicated, and the need for food diminished. (Paul occasionally mocked Barnabas about his plumpness, he told me, calling him “our fat angel.”)
Because Barnabas had no talent or even inclination for public speaking, the burdens of oratory fell exclusively on Paul, who began to hone his skills in front of audiences, trying various tactics to hold their attention. Poor Barnabas struggled to understand Paul’s ideas, especially the notion that one actually became Jesus by following him, by emptying oneself and taking on what Paul memorably called “the mind of the Christ.”
But Paul was Paul, a man who could not resist thinking in complex ways in public, pushing ideas to the point where the normal lines of argument broke down. He could excite and inform listeners but might also leave them confused as he outrode their capacities, and even his own. “What I don’t know defines me, not what I know,” he said.
I suspect it was Paul’s unguarded and natural intimacy that offended John Mark, as it did many others. In conversation, he pressed too close, his nose hairs spiking though his nostrils. He touched you when he talked, often poked and jabbed to make a point. The garlicky rankness of his breath could prove overpowering. When he met you, he locked gazes, and it was impossible to evade him or pull away.
I heard from Barnabas that Paul had mercilessly teased John Mark about women, making insinuations. “She’s a pretty one, no?” he might say. Or “Don’t get your hopes up,” when a nubile beauty passed in the street. This must have upset the young man terribly. In fact, I met John Mark a few years later, and I could understand Paul’s discomfort. He was an arrogant fellow, one who lived in a shiny sphere of his own, deaf to the wishes of others and consumed by his own voice, which perhaps sounded loudly in his head. His needs whipped him about, and he took offense easily and often.
After the departure of John Mark, Barnabas and Paul proceeded, following the eastward itinerary established at the outset: Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. Traveling on foot, they slept when possible in huts along the way, these lonely outposts used by shepherds. Or they went to sleep under the stars, which had its charms for Paul, who could not cease from speculating on the nature of these gaudy pinpoints in the heavens above, this spectacle that nature offered on a nightly basis. He would lecture Barnabas on the poetic efforts of the pagan Lucretius to understand the meaning of the heavens. “We all derive from that celestial seed,” Lucretius wrote, and Paul recalled in a sonorous voice: “A selfsame father generated all, / And gave this earth, our mother, drops of rain / To bring forth this luxuriant bright world.”
Barnabas had not heard of Lucretius, but he worried that a heathen should be granted so much leeway to interpret the nature of the heavens. “He would not have known our God,” he said.
“Our God is infinite, and shows himself in various faces. Even the heathen can find God.”
Barnabas would never get used to Paul’s curious dicta, these “sayings” of his, which adorned the letters he would write to gatherings throughout the empire. I did my best to make a note of wise or interesting things that he said in passing. Indeed, I hated to imagine how many were lost, as I could not write everything down. And often, when I did, I discovered later that he simply quoted (or slightly misquoted) the ancient authors, usually the Greeks.
Once I complained to him about this passion for quotation, and he said, “What is the universe but God’s quotation of himself?”
The idea was ever to seek out Jewish communities first, as Paul knew very well how to approach Jews, being one himself. He respected them and didn’t overwhelm them with intricacies of the gospel. Jews clung to their routines, their ancient practices and legalities, and they would not easily see the advantages of a new way to regard the world. Often enough, they expressed skepticism about the emergence of yet another rabbi, especially one who seemed to overturn the edicts delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai.
After weeks of tramping, Paul and Barnabas arrived at the gates of Pisidia (called Antioch of Pisidia by some), this walled Roman town with a strong military presence and a small but persistent Jewish community. It had long attracted retired officers from the imperial legions, and campaign banners waved from the towers as a stiff wind crackled the surrounding brush.
“Augustus knew what he was doing,” Paul said to Barnabas. “The army set up bases throughout Galatia and brought Roman order to bear. Governance by extension, propelled by good roads. An excellent formula!”
Paul admired Roman order, which placed him distinctly at odds with many in the Way, who wondered how he could remain loyal to a government that had crucified the Christ. Jews in turn denounced what they considered his apparent loyalty to the emperor, failing to see that Paul simply and sincerely believed that history would end soon, making all imperial claims to earthly power superfluous.
Paul and Barnabas expected questions, but nobody even noticed them as they stepped through the city gates. Why trouble over a plump, gray-bearded, middle-aged Jew accompanied by a skinny, stooped, balding companion who leaned on a stick for balance? Visitors were common enough here, and so these unremarkable travelers aroused no suspicion.
In the market, where chickens and pigeons gabbled under the feet of donkeys, Paul asked a seller of melons, figs, and dates (which were displayed in a wooden barrow) the whereabouts of the synagogue. The merchant gestured to a nearby house, doubtless recognizing Paul as a fellow Jew.
A venerable, toothless rabbi named Zebadiah welcomed them as if he had waited decades for their appearance. (Paul thought he surely mistook them for someone else.) In any case, they were fed sumptuously that night; the rabbi offered them unleavened bread from his oven, grilled hare, green almonds, and small clay bowls that brimmed with chickpeas mashed with oil and cumin, with plenty of good wine in clay pitchers. A slave girl waited on them, and later that night several elders from the synagogue arrived to ask questions, having heard that an “important scholar of the Torah” had appeared in their midst. They listened with astonishment as Paul once again recalled his experience on his journey to Damascus.
Paul’s status as a former student of Gamaliel impressed them in Pisidia, and they invited him to speak at the synagogue on the upcoming Sabbath. He was, as ever, happy to oblige, and for two weeks in a row he attended these gatherings—a dozen or more men of various ages—standing in the midst of them and expounding on the scriptures in a rapturous voice, often reciting long passages from memory. The Greek version came to him swiftly and verbatim: the preferred translation of these Jews as well. It also suited the Godfearers, who rarely knew any Hebrew.
Most of them listened politely to Paul, but one of the elders, Micah by name, upbraided him at the end of the second Sabbath meeting. “I’ve never heard of this Rabbi Jesus,” he said.
“You will hear him now, but only if you listen,” Paul said.
“Hear him? He’s not in the room!”
There were smiles, which Paul expected.
“But he is!” Paul declaimed. “He’s alive!”
Paul continued without pause, calling Jesus the Christ, the anointed one, who had been sent by God to establish a kingdom without end. “He is the son of God and our true king,” Paul added.
Micah said, “The emperor won’t like this.”
Paul refused to back down. “Let me tell you more. Jesus will soon return from the heavens to judge each of us. And those found wanting will sink into the muck, the black pit.” He elaborated on the idea of the pit, which he filled with vipers and maggots for good effect. It was a rare dark turn for him because he didn’t commonly think in these punitive terms.
“There is no pit,” said Micah. “With death, we die.”
“We never die,” Paul responded, raising his arms like Moses preparing to part the Red Sea. “In Jesus, we live!”
This language perplexed them, but Paul and Barnabas experienced none of the anger in this room that would meet them soon with force. For the most part, his listeners nodded or grumbled. Only one man stood to ask in a polite but pointed fashion, “Does this have anything to do with the Law? I’m not sure I see your point.”
“Jesus revises the Law,” said Paul. “His way is a new way. Radical equality—this is what he preaches. Radical equality! No Jew, no Greek! No man, no woman!”
A small number of this congregation met with Paul separately, and they began a circle of the Way that would prosper, although they often fell into division in later years. Paul called them “the quarrelsome Galatians,” and yet he retained an abiding fondness for them, especially a teacher named Adam, one of those rare Jews who had studied philosophy at the Academy in Athens. Paul immediately found kinship with him, and they spent two or three long nights in conversation, working their way through the intellectual byways of Godly thinking, trying to understand how Greek theories (especially the reforms of Solon, the great lawgiver and poet) might function in the context of Jewish traditions.
In later years, Paul swore it was in Pisidia that his ideas about radical equality in Jesus—an idea that would reshape the Way and its thinking—began to emerge with clarity, when he grew alert to the full weight of its implications. “I saw such bright lines,” he would say. “I wish I could have spent years, not days, with Adam.”
Fears that Paul was corrupting young Jews arose, and Rabbi Zebadiah suggested that it might prove dangerous for them to remain in the city for long. Hearing this, Barnabas insisted that they depart for Iconium the next morning, and Paul didn’t object. He could not see taking unwarranted risks, and he did hope for a return to Antioch before too many months had passed.
Iconium was a Greek-style democracy, almost a city-state like Athens in the age of Pericles. Paul thought they might find in this community any number of gentiles who were ready to begin the work of creating God’s kingdom on earth. As ever, however, he and Barnabas knew they must begin their mission with the Jews. So they sought out Onesiphorus, whose name had been given to them by Adam. He was a wealthy merchant, a Greek turned Godfearer, known for his spiritual energies and warm manner.
Onesiphorus struck Paul as a man who could be turned easily to the Way. He knew nothing of Jesus but was immediately able to grasp what Paul told him. He invited Paul and Barnabas to his house for a dinner the same day he met them, asking pointed and useful questions. As he, too, had once studied in Jerusalem with Gamaliel, he and Paul talked at length about the roots of Jewish mystical thinking in the Merkabah school, whose scholars dwelled on the prophet Ezekiel and his vision of a divine chariot, of angels and seraphim.
I suspect that poor Barnabas was left out of this discussion.
Soon Paul baptized Onesiphorus in a brisk stream on the outskirts of the city. This impressive man, elegant in every way, occupied a light-filled house on a hill overlooking the city, which was conveniently attached to the much larger villa of his sister, Theocleia, a widow who lived with her beautiful daughter, Thecla. This girl, who had luxurious chestnut hair and olive-hued skin, was betrothed to Thamyris, a shockingly handsome boy, the son of a local magistrate.
Paul later told me that Thamyris was “among examples of the male form the most exquisite version” that he had yet seen. He compared him to Paris and Adonis, two legendary men of beauty.
Onesiphorus invited this mother and daughter, with Thamyris as well, to a gathering at his house, where a number of local Jews and Godfearers met for an evening of prayer and conversation, now amplified by the enthusiasm of Onesiphorus himself. The betrothed couple sat on cushions at Paul’s feet as he talked, bewitching him with their rapt gazes, drawing from him what Barnabas (without irony) called “long and rhapsodic divagations on the meaning of the risen Christ.”
Thecla and Thamyris had a shimmer about them, their faces lit from within, as Paul told me. Thecla, however, fastened her gaze on the apostle with an intensity that was noticed by the others, including her betrothed, who looked coldly to the floor when he realized the extent of Thecla’s absorption. Surely this man’s wild theological diversions could not be taken so seriously?
That night Paul told everyone in the room that the end of history drew near, and therefore it made no sense to marry. Young people should “forswear copulation, the dream of children, all hope of generations to come” because Jesus would soon return to earth, thus making “fantasies of family life” irrelevant. “Train your affections on God alone,” he said. “Keep your eye on heaven.”
Barnabas remembered the discomfort in the room as he spoke. He recalled that Paul continued with such vehemence that many of his listeners gasped, and one elderly Godfearer fanned herself and fainted. (Two men carried her from the room, and yet Paul continued to talk without pause, as if unaware of what had occurred.) Thecla sighed as Paul neared the climax of his talk, drawing rapid breaths as she leaned toward him. Thamyris continued to look away in distress. What had at first seemed interesting, even amusing, now annoyed and dismayed him.
“Let the young be young,” Barnabas said to Paul later that night.
“I will not! There is neither young nor old in the world. Age is meaningless. The king will return soon, and time will become irrelevant. It’s already meaningless.”
Barnabas didn’t disagree, but he urged caution. Did God really wish for every member of the Way to rearrange his or her life? He remembered that resonant line in the book of Psalms: For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past. When Jesus suggested he might come “soon,” that could mean thousands of years from now!
Paul discarded this suggestion. “He has whispered to me in my prayers, and quite recently I could hear his voice in my sleep. Believe me, Barnabas, he will draw near, and soon. And soon is soon, not a thousand years!”
Drawn to Paul, Thecla became a regular visitor to her uncle’s house, appearing in the afternoon with fruit or freshly baked bread, eagerly seeking out the apostle’s attention. His arguments persuaded her that the Kingdom of God was at hand, and she opened her heart to God in the name of Jesus. Like her uncle, she was baptized in the nearby stream.
She had asked Thamyris to join her, but he scoffed at the idea. “I’m a Greek. This man, Paul—he is a Jew!”
When Paul heard this from Thecla, he countered: “Tell him I speak the same language as Homer and Plato.”
“But you are a Jew.”
Paul replied, almost chanting, “In the Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew. You must explain this to your betrothed, whom—I fear—you should abandon. There is no point to marriage. That pleasure must be forsworn. The end of time is upon us.”
Thecla agreed, saying she would not go forward with the marriage. She would devote herself to the Christ, to the work of bringing his message forward in the world. Thamyris would understand.
In fact, nothing of this set well with Thamyris or his family, who were influential in the city, and it surprised no one to learn that three soldiers soon arrived at the house of Onesiphorus looking for Paul of Tarsus.
“What do you want with him?” Barnabas asked.
“It’s none of your business.”
“Paul and I are associates.”
“Is he home?”
“He is not.”
“Then we shall wait for him.”
The soldiers made themselves comfortable under a lemon tree in the garden. They had brought with them bread, cheese, and a jug of wine. It was clearly their intention to stay until Paul returned, whereupon they would seize him. Barnabas feared they might kill him, too.
Paul was asleep in the back room, and Barnabas had to slap his cheek. “We have a chance to go, but now!”
Onesiphorus came in, breathless, to say someone had taken away Thecla.
Paul reddened. “She is one of us!”
“I suspect they want to get her away from you. She belongs to Thamyris. His father is enraged, and I’m very worried about what will become of you.” He looked genuinely frightened.
“I won’t allow this,” said Paul.
“It’s not your decision, I’m afraid. I don’t want your blood on my hands.”
Barnabas sided with Onesiphorus, who assured Paul that he would not abandon the vision of Jesus, nor would he lose sight of their common purpose. Paul had already achieved what he set out to achieve in Iconium.
Unexpectedly, as if unmoved by anything that his companions said, Paul fell to his knees and began to pray under his breath, lifting his palms to the heavens. He shut his eyes, and the lashes quivered. He mumbled now, drooling slightly, incoherent. Then he opened his eyes.
“Jesus spoke to me.”
“Now?”
“Lystra awaits us,” he told me. “All of Lystra!”
“Good,” Onesiphorus said, relieved and helping Paul to stand. “Go quickly, and to Lystra.”
He mentioned that the soldiers lay in wait in the street and suggested that Paul and Barnabas dress as women—he had several slaves who would help to clothe them—and exit through a servants’ door at the back. “It sounds foolish, but it’s perhaps the only way.”
“We shall make ugly women,” Barnabas said.
They slipped on the ankle-length tunics that women in this part of Asia wore, with long veils covering their heads. It was not unusual for modest women who walked in public to hide themselves from view, and they would take their chances in this disguise.
“We look a fine pair of ladies,” Barnabas said to Paul before they stepped into the afternoon sunlight.
Paul recited a passage from the fifth scroll of the Torah: The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God.
Barnabas did not find this either funny or pertinent, but he was relieved to see Paul going along with the plan for their escape.
They passed through the garden behind the house, noticing the three men sitting by the lemon tree, who paid no attention to Paul and Barnabas, as a game of chance (and the wine) absorbed them. Only one of them turned slightly to the passersby and, with a show of respect, nodded slightly. He watched, perhaps puzzled, as these peculiarly shy women stepped through the doorway into a narrow street.
Nobody took notice as this pair of unappealing older women—one of them stout, the other like a rail and stooped—limped by with their satchels, one of them leaning on a stick. They hurried to the stream where Paul had baptized a number of people in the past week, stopping to bathe their feet in the icy water.
Feeling disburdened, Paul drew attention to the yellow spikes of asphodels that lined the banks as the sun flashed in the quick water. “God is shining on us,” he said, removing his tunic. “And Lystra awaits. I have a feeling in my stomach: This will be a turning point for the Way. Mark my words, Barnabas.”
The wide plains swept them forward on the two-day journey to Lystra, another walled Roman city. They slept that night perhaps ten miles from their destination in a mountain hut, where an elderly herdsman fed them bread and goat’s milk. He spoke no Greek, and Paul realized they had come into a region where less Greek would be heard, at least among working people and slaves, who had dialects of their own.
“They strangle when they try to speak,” Barnabas said to Paul. “I can recognize a word or two, but not much more.”
In the morning as they approached the city, its pink limestone walls topped with crenellated parapets and turrets, children and dogs began to run in circles around them. They heard the bleating of sheep and goats. Deep-throated bells rumbled over rooftops, and soon a number of men and women emerged from behind the trees and bushes.
“There must be an occasion,” Barnabas said.
“We’re the occasion,” Paul said. “I sense God’s hand at work in Lystra.”
This was, as they both knew from advance reports, a city with few Jews, although they had a contact in Lystra—a woman called Eunice, a Jew formerly from Antioch, whom Phoebe knew well and admired. She and Timothy, her son, were already followers of the Way, and they had formed a tiny gathering at their house. But the name of Jesus meant nothing to most dwellers in this city, where innumerable temples and altars to pagan gods and goddesses could be found. The chief deity here was Zeus—the god of thunder, the mighty one of Mount Olympus.
As we know from the ancient poets, who never tired of writing about this god of thunder, the mightiest figure on Olympus, nothing could restrain his erotic energies. He sired endless progeny over the centuries, including Athena, Apollo, and Artemis. Even gods who were not his actual offspring called him father, bowing in his presence.
Now a crippled man scuttled crabwise in the dirt and mumbled to himself as he approached Paul and Barnabas.
“What’s your name, sir?” asked Paul.
The fellow grinned, a toothless slice of a smile. His tongue slithered in and out of his mouth like a lizard, and he spat in the dirt.
Paul waited patiently. Then he shouted, “Speak to us!”
“Ariston,” he said.
Paul lit up. “Which means ‘the best.’ I do believe that’s what it means.”
Barnabas enjoyed this. “So are you the best they have in Lystra?” he asked.
The crowd that had gathered around them, a dozen or more, laughed, enjoying the mockery. A piece of unexpected theater is always welcome.
“I’m from a good family,” Ariston said. “Very good, my parents, they are. But my legs never did carry my body.”
“And do you wish to walk?” Paul asked.
“I do.”
Paul considered him. “Let me tell you that my God can help.”
“Who is your God?”
“Jehovah. He is the only God, the God of Israel.”
“There are so many gods…”
“There is only one God. He is here, there, and in all places around us. In the air and grasslands, in the walls of this city, every stone and crevice cries out to him. He lives inside of you, Ariston. He makes you the best of the best.”
“In me?”
“Feel him in your breast, I beg you. Feel him!”
Paul put his right hand on the forehead of Ariston. This brought stillness as well as curiosity. The crowd could not imagine what lay in store, but several of them grinned in the expectation that this mysterious visitor would soon reveal his fraudulence, and everyone would laugh.
“Rise,” Paul said, unworried that the poor fellow might prove incapable of lifting himself from the ground. “Rise in the name of Jesus the Christ!”
A crack of thunder came, although not a cloud could be seen anywhere in the sky, and fear rippled through the crowd, moving from one person to the next, as when a cold wind moves through a deep forest and each leaf suddenly trembles.
Ariston looked thoroughly befuddled, afraid.
“Rise!” Paul said.
“I can’t do it,” Ariston whispered. “I cannot get up. My legs—”
Paul spoke sternly: “Rise and walk, in the name of Jehovah, the only God. Rise and walk in his holy name!”
The poor man asked for a stick from a man beside him. Using it for balance, he drew his legs beneath him and, with a grimace, pulled himself to a standing position. He wobbled for a few steps, then truly walked, even casting aside the stick.
As Paul recalled at a later time, “I saw him dancing! Dancing Ariston!”
The crowd gaped at this spectacle, and one of them shrieked, “The gods have come to us! This is Zeus! This is Hermes!”
A dozen of the citizens of Lystra groveled before them. One young man lay prostrate on the ground at Paul’s feet, letting his face drop into the dirt. A woman fell before Barnabas on her knees, lolling her tongue. She lifted her arms to him, as if beseeching.
“They believe you are Zeus,” said Paul.
“It must be the beard,” said Barnabas.
A small girl appeared with a bouquet of yellow wildflowers, which she gave to Paul, and then a hoary-headed man, possibly a priest at the Temple of Zeus, stepped through the crowd, which opened for him with a hush of respect. A number of heads bowed in his presence and mumbles of adoration could be heard from several women in veils. The priest wore a pristine linen tunic and a necklace of glass and silver shards, and he carried a long staff. He wore no shoes, but the bottoms of his feet were as thick and brown as old leather.
He pointed to Barnabas. “We acknowledge your presence among us, bearer of thunder. We have long expected your visit.”
Barnabas looked at Paul with confusion, as the true meaning of this commotion still eluded him. He thought Paul had been joking when he said they thought he was Zeus. On the other hand, when did Paul joke about anything?
“Great One, you have come to us for a reason, and you honor us,” the priest continued. “We shall sacrifice a bull.” He tilted the top of his staff toward Paul. “Oh, messenger of the gods, you are welcome, too!”
The crowd multiplied, with townsfolk rushing to see these visitors. Rumors of this miracle of healing spread like seeds in the wind. And people began to chant and circle around the visitors, holding hands, dancing. Paul recognized the chant as an ancient hymn to Zeus, one that—he would tell me—“was known well before Homer sang of Troy.”
The priest shouted above the canticle, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men. We are blessed, Lycaonians!”
Several young men lifted Paul and Barnabas on their shoulders, parading them through the city gates, bearing them aloft to the Temple of Zeus with the beating of brassy cymbals and hollow drums. They set them down gingerly before what seemed like an altar, whereupon a chorus began to sing their praises in the odd language of the region, which neither Paul nor Barnabas could understand, although they could sense the veneration. One wild-eyed woman with curly auburn hair threw herself at the feet of Barnabas, weeping, mumbling.
“She would like to kiss your feet,” said Paul.
“So I am Zeus,” Barnabas said, “and you are Hermes.”
Paul found it difficult to accept this confusion, or to understand what it meant for the ultimate success of their mission here, but he could do nothing. The crowd swelled, chaotic, numbering several hundred devotees of Zeus within less than an hour. A band of young men with painted faces whirled with their spears in circles, with one of them pirouetting in the middle. An old woman knelt, issuing a tremulous and unearthly howl—as if the world had come to an end before her eyes. There was a choir of small girls who sang what seemed like a sweet if inappropriate tune. And soon a pair of oxen in garlands trod to the slaughter behind a young votary at the temple in a salmon-colored silk robe, with the sound of tambourines and loud copper barrels rung by hammers.
A thin woman in a headdress began to kiss Paul’s feet, but he pushed her away. “I am not Hermes!” he shouted. “Away, girl!”
The woman turned to Barnabas next. Her eyes filled with tears as she began to claw at his garment.
“Let go!” he said, as she clutched his belly.
“I worship you, Great One! Listen to my prayers!”
“Don’t touch me, please!”
Paul ripped off his own tunic, exposing his bare hollow chest. “I am Paul, a man. I am like you. I am a man!”
It was evident that they understood little of what Paul said as they lifted him, then Barnabas, back onto their shoulders and carried them to a handsome travertine house behind the Temple of Zeus.
“This is for you,” said a man in yellow robes, another votary, in vaguely comprehensible Greek.
“I am not Zeus,” Barnabas said.
The man shook his head sadly. “You must accept your greatness, my Lord.”
They left them with baskets of food—assorted meats, fruit, honey, and bread—and amphorae of wine.
Paul knew he must pray for instruction.
The house was still, which came as a relief after a time of such commotion and confusion. They had been provided with soft pallets and cushions of silk, and Barnabas, exhausted by the scramble of the day, soon fell into a consuming sleep while Paul prayed.
As often happened when he prayed, Paul slipped into a trance—eyes closed, hands apart, palms upturned. He swayed forward and back, pivoting at the waist, his lips moving. Once in a while he sighed or seemed to wince. Prayer, for him, was agonistic, an effort of listening, with his attention spiraling inward. He grunted at times. He wrestled with whatever dark angels presented themselves. Sometimes, he told me, he could actually see a brilliant rank of seraphim, with the Lord himself, the Ancient of Days, perched on the edge of an alabaster cloud.
After a while, Paul could not help himself but fell asleep beside Barnabas. God had offered no instruction.
They both awakened to shouts on the street below and saw dozens of angry faces.
In an unexpected reversal, a furious mob had come to kill them, or so it appeared. Paul saw Thamyris below, with a cluster of young friends, and immediately understood that they had followed them from Iconium to seek revenge. Apparently it was not enough simply to disappear. Paul and Barnabas must suffer.
The door had never been locked, and so a crowd seized Paul and Barnabas, taking them to separate locations in Lystra. And Barnabas found himself in a small cell with a damp floor.
“We have done nothing,” he told his jailor. “Let me go at once!”
“You are not Zeus,” the jailor replied.
“I never said I was.”
“Your friend, he was able to heal the cripple.”
“God healed him. He spoke in the name of Jehovah, the only God.”
“There are many gods.”
“No, sir. There is one. Let me tell you about him. And let me tell you about his son, Jesus the Christ.”
This jailor was a young Greek-speaking man, with a dark brown beard, and he leaned toward Barnabas. He seemed willing to listen and drew up a chair, allowing Barnabas to explain himself. Where had they come from? Why had Lycaonians ever thought they were gods?
In the meantime, they took Paul—the devil himself, who had healed a lame man in the name of his foreign god—to the outskirts of Lystra near the city dump.
Thinking of Jesus in his time of trial, Paul didn’t resist, not even when one of them hurled a large stone at his head, knocking him to the ground. Another man kicked him in the back so hard that he could hear his spine crack, while further stones rained on his head, and Paul believed that what happened to Stephen on the outskirts of Jerusalem would happen to him. It was not a pretty death, and not what he expected from Lystra.
Yet Paul refused to resist. “In Jesus there is neither Greek nor Jew,” he whispered.
But these were not Greeks, not exactly, and they were certainly not Jews.
They stepped on Paul and kicked him in the ribs, pummeled him with stones. And left him for dead. Paul’s eyes rolled back in his head, leaving ghastly white globes without life in them. Blood poured from his left ear.
“He’s dead,” said one of his attackers.
In contrast, the jailor looking after Barnabas listened to him intently and then prayed with him. Soon the Holy Spirit overwhelmed his soul. Without a thought to the consequences of his action, he opened the door of the cell, saying, “Go with God!”
Barnabas walked unmolested into the alleyway, strolled into the marketplace, then out of the gates of the city. And nobody paid the least attention to him, although a young girl with an angelic face approached and touched his hand as soon as he stepped outside of the walls. He could see that she wanted him to follow her, and he understood that God had sent her as a messenger.
She led him to the dump where Paul lay dying.
Blood pooled around him, dampening the dirt. One ear was battered, torn. Barnabas bent to pray over his companion’s limp body, asking God to accept his soul.
“This is thy humble servant,” Barnabas said. “Take him, dearest Lord.”
“Not yet,” said Paul, in a gravelly voice. He opened one swollen eye.
“You are not dead!”
Now three or four young men approached, and Barnabas was afraid they would finish off Paul and stone him as well. But they lifted Paul gently, settling him on a litter, and carried him along a pebble-strewn path to a racing stream. They lowered him into the cool water, and one of them washed the blood from his head, using his hand to clear the skin. Paul wakened fully now, his eyes wide.
“God has spoken,” Barnabas said.
The stream poured into a marshy area below, and they watched a dozen or so long-beaked white storks fishing for frogs, while buzzards circled above them on black wings.
Barnabas and the young men lifted Paul onto a mossy bank, where he lay with a tuft of grass beneath his head. One of the men tended to Paul’s torn ear, bandaging it with muslin.
Later that day, a couple of women brought them food and drink.
Paul lost consciousness again, falling into an expressionless cold sleep. When after several hours he hadn’t wakened, Barnabas began to fear for Paul’s life. He put a palm to the apostle’s mouth, which was slightly ajar, and could feel a faint breath: the only sign of life. Paul lay there like a barely smoldering fire, his flames liable to flicker and turn to blue ash at any moment. But before darkness fell, his eyes opened, and he managed a single word: Jesus.
Barnabas said to him, “Yes, Paul. Jesus. Jesus.”